Yesterday I wrote about how IT’s portfolio of compute models will shift over the next 3-5 years. I ended by saying that the line between virtualization and private cloud will blur and that there are two ways of getting to private cloud: Evolutionary and Revolutionary. Intrigued? Well then press on dear reader…
The Evolutionary Approach
The evolutionary approach starts with virtualization and is appropriate where large investments in that area have been made and when you are talking about traditional enterprise applications. With virtualization serving as the foundation (see the graph below), additional capabilities are then layered on, such as usage-based-billing/chargeback, workload lifecycle management, dynamic resource pooling, a self-service portal for users etc.
One of the key aspects of the Evolutionary approach is that every step along the way, every capability added, brings greater efficiencies and agility. You do not need to wait until you meet the full definition of a private cloud to derive value and you can stop anywhere along the way.
You say you want a Revolution?
The other way to get to private cloud is the Revolutionary approach. This is appropriate for Greenfield opportunities within organizations, and is targeted at non-traditional, web 2.0 applications that are “cloud-native” (i.e. applications written in the cloud for deployment in the cloud). These revolutionary solutions will often be delivered as an integrated, turnkey unit (see graph below).
You don’t need to choose
Rather than adopting one or the other, most organizations will use both approaches to get to private cloud. While at this stage the evolutionary approach will be the predominate way of getting to private cloud, as more and more “new world” applications are developed in the cloud for the cloud, the balance will begin tip in favor of the revolutionary approach.
Tune in soon for a specific example of a revolutionary cloud solution (and a whole lot more). 
Pau for now…